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  • Introduction:The Once and Future Orpheus
  • Ruth Levitas (bio) and Tom Moylan (bio)

Ernst Bloch, the most significant theorist of the concept of utopia, reserved a particular place for music. He had studied music at university, alongside philosophy and physics, and played the piano; in 1974 Bloch said that he "would probably have been a mediocre Kappelmeister but for . . . a certain talent for philosophy."1 A large part of his early work, Geist der Utopie, is dedicated to an essay on the philosophy of music, and he returns to the subject in the third volume of The Principle of Hope . The impact of Bloch's early work was considerable. Otto Klemperer (Bloch's exact contemporary) was introduced to Geist der Utopie by Georg Simmel and thought it brilliant; he and Bloch became close friends. In the 1920s, Klemperer was appointed conductor of the avant-garde Kroll Opera in Berlin. Bloch was closely integrated into the intellectual circle around the Kroll and wrote the introductory program article for its first production, Beethoven's Fidelio. Besides writing articles for the Kroll programs and contributing to the music journal Anbruch, Bloch allegedly danced a minuet with Igor Stravinsky at the Kroll's opening performance of Oedipus Rex.2 [End Page 204]

At all stages of his life, Bloch insisted that music had a particular utopian role in articulating the Not Yet and, indeed, bringing the future world into being. He makes three distinct claims about music. One is that music's capacity for direct human expression produces a capability of expressing the suffering, hope, and desire of oppressed people. However, like all art, music is socially conditioned—and more so than other cultural forms. There is clearly a tension, if not a contradiction, between these statements. But much of The Principle of Hope can be read as an attempt to recover or expose the residue of concrete utopia in culture, art, and religion. Those elements that are detachable from, or exceed, the immediate conditions of production Bloch describes as cultural surplus, and music, he insists, is particularly rich in this. It is perhaps the existential rather than cognitive response that is crucial; thus Bloch writes that "music is one great subjective theurgy, . . . a theurgy that proposes to sing, to invoke, that which is essential and most like proper human beings" or that which expresses "adequateness to our own core." Moreover, "experience of music provides the best access to the hermeneutics of the emotions, especially the expectant emotions," and thus "music is that art of pre-appearance which relates most intensively to the welling core of existence (moment) of That-Which-Is and relates most expansively to its horizon;—cantus essentiam fontis vocat [singing summons the existence of the fountain]."3

Most studies of Bloch acknowledge the claims made for music, but few pursue them very far. Wayne Hudson notes that "for Bloch, music is the most utopian of the arts. It is speech which men can understand," and " music expresses something 'not yet.' It copies what is objectively undetermined in the world. . . . In this sense there is a pre-appearance . . . of the realisation of the realising factor in music: a proleptic promise of a new heaven and a new earth"; yet his book devotes less than two pages to the issue.4 Fredric Jameson records that for Bloch "there exist . . . existential experiences which may be understood as foreshadowings of what the plenitude of . . . an ultimate Utopian instant might be like: this . . . is the most genuine function of music as a limited and yet pure feeling of that unity of outside and inside which Utopia will establish in all the dimensions of existence. . . . [M]usic is profoundly Utopian, both in its form and in its content."5 The main exceptions are David Drew's thirty-page introductory essay in the 1985 edition of Essays on the Philosophy of Music, which sets out the social, intellectual, and institutional context of Bloch's writings on music, as well as stressing its uniquely [End Page 205] utopian content; and a body of work by Maynard Solomon, especially on Mozart and Beethoven, which draws explicitly on Bloch's approach to music. Within utopian studies, however, notwithstanding the general...

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